Insurance in Kenya and Africa at large remains a marginal product, with levels of penetration across the continent half the world average as a percentage of GDP, and premiums per capita 11-fold lower than the world average, according to a recent report by McKinsey and Co. (and that’s including the outsized market of South Africa;…
A number of high-profile investors are chasing to invest in Slice, a fintech startup that is attempting to expand the market for credit cards in India. Tiger Global is in advanced stages of talks to lead a round of over $100 million in the Bangalore-based startup, sources familiar with the matter told me. A number…
Riiid, a South Korea-headquartered AI-powered edtech company, acquired its Japanese distribution partner Langoo to expand its Japan footprint. The acquisition comes after the company’s latest $175 million Series D round from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 in May. Riiid has said it will continue to fuel its global expansion with the funding. Langoo, Riiid’s partner in…
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don’t have: the iPhone’s Settings screen. Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their…
Zūm, a startup that provides optimized transportation services for school-age children, has announced the close of a $130 million Series D raise, bringing its total funding to more than $200 million. The company intends to use the funds to add 10,000 new electric vehicles to its platform with the end goal of achieving 100% EVs…
Getsafe has extended its Series B round that it previously announced in December 2020. In addition to its original Series B round of $30 million, the company is adding another $63 million in fresh capital. Overall, Getsafe has raised a $93 million Series B round. Investors in today’s funding round include unnamed family offices as…
Twitter announced Wednesday that it would offload MoPub, the mobile ad platform it bought back in 2013, selling the company to mobile game and marketing software maker AppLovin. Twitter paid around $350 million for MoPub back in 2013 and will sell the company for $1.05 billion in cash. MoPub helped Twitter bring in around $188…
OpenStack, the open-source project that gives large enterprises and public cloud providers the tools to run their own AWS-like private clouds in their data centers, today announced the release of OpenStack 24. Codenamed Xena, the release focuses on polishing many of the system’s sharper edges. It’s no secret that the OpenStack project, which now falls…
Spanish ride-hailing unicorn Cabify is getting into grocery deliveries as it looks to add another string to its multi-modal mobility and urban utility bow. It announced the addition of a ‘Super’ option in its app today — which is available for users in nine cities in its home market, namely: A Coruña, Alicante, Barcelona, Madrid,…
While working as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore and San Francisco for the past 10 years, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO and co-founder of Autify, came to realize that there’s one common problem in the software development industry; software testing takes excessive time. Chikazawa and co-founder Sam Yamashita started Autify in 2016 in San Francisco to…
